


Wait for me, I'm coming

by madelinewrites (mac_writes)



Category: Code Name Verity Series - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Hadestown References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:15:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24618943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mac_writes/pseuds/madelinewrites
Summary: Maddie through the years, after the war.
Relationships: Jamie Beaufort-Stuart/Maddie Brodatt, Julie Beaufort-Stuart/Maddie Brodatt
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	Wait for me, I'm coming

_ Wait for me, I’m coming. _

I see you the day after you die, Julie. I swear on everything I am, I hear you sigh in the morning when I wake. I hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep. I swear I see you slip out of the room just as I wake up. I trip over my own feet, then again over my boots, trying to get to you. Had I missed? Were you alive? You told me, “Kiss me, Hardy” and “Kiss me quick” and I did, I did, and you are not in the hall and you are not anywhere. You are lying in a ditch and I can only pray someone will come to bury you. You are lying in a ditch because of me and I cannot stand myself at this moment. I want to vomit, I want to scream, I want to go back there and hold you but I cannot. You will not move and I cannot go. 

You cannot be dead. You cannot be. You burn too bright for that, for death to just take you. A bullet in a gun, in the air, in your chest, and it’s my fault. I’m the one who put out the flame. I’m the one, and I can’t move past this. I’m going to be stuck here forever in this moment, waiting for you to come around a bend or out a door and frown at me and call me “Maddie, darling” and tell me to come to bed again. You would stand there in your slip, stupidly affectionate, and touch my face and hold my hand, like I hadn’t been the one to kill you in the end. These hands that held you dealt the final blow, and you had asked me to. 

“Kiss me, Hardy,” and I wish I could. 

“Kiss me, quick,” and I know I must. 

I meant to miss, darling. I meant to save you. Jamie tells me that I have saved you. How can I tell him that saving you meant holding you in my arms again? How can I tell him how much I love you? How can he just  _ forgive me _ for killing his sister?

He is like you, and not, Julie, and seeing him now just hurts. He is you if you were a man and didn’t have to burn as bright to compensate for being a woman. The whole world is dim and strange without you now. My sense of self has been divided into thirds. 

One third remains alive. I  _ must _ keep flying. I think you’ll haunt me forever anyways, but you’d make a nuisance of yourself haunting me if I never flew again. So I’ll keep flying, for you, Julie. You always made me want to fly. You were my favorite passenger. You will not be my last, because this is my job and there is still a war on without you here. 

One third remains on the edge of that empty, cold space where you died. I watch you drop like a stone, a statue carved from marble and granite, because of the trigger I pulled. You weren’t well, I could see that from where I was. You  _ wanted  _ me to be the one to do the deed. I would like to think, when I can think about it at all, that it was a comfort having me be the one to pull the trigger and not some enemy soldier getting the last laugh. I  _ wanted _ you safe and in my arms and healthy and with me. 

One third remains in the climb. I will never, ever come down from that climb. I will be stuck there forever, and the sky could turn green and purple and red and white and black for all I care. I will keep climbing, stuck there, stranded, without you. If I am stuck in the climb, maybe you are stuck in the fall, and everything will be alright again.

_ Wait for me, I’m coming with - _

  
  


_ Wait for me, I’m coming _

I see you again on my wedding day. I’m marrying your brother, and I think you would have liked that. Jamie is good and he is kind and he lets me fly, but he is not you. You didn’t just  _ let  _ me fly. You  _ made _ me fly. You made me brave, Julie. I am not feeling brave on my wedding day. I am marrying your brother - officially becoming a Beaufort-Stuart, but it is not in the way I’d planned. So when I see you, Julie, turning the corner, walking away from me again, I freeze. I can hear your laughter, faintly, but it is there and it is you.

I do not have much time - I really am supposed to be getting married, but I follow anyways. You know I’ll always follow you, Julie. 

But you are not there when I turn the corner, and it has been a year since your death. Your voice still echoes in my dreams sometimes, like I am hearing your cry for the first time every time. Grief still punches through me and leaves me raw. I feel like less of a person without you, but the war and the world have gone on without you. I suppose I must as well. 

I think, for a split second, about leaving. Trying to find you wherever you have gone. Something tells me you have gone where I cannot yet follow. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think you would let me. You would tell me to marry your brother, to go on living like you’d asked me to when you yelled out to me that night. 

And, love, there can only be one night I’m talking about. You started walking away from me that night, began leading me around corners looking for you with this wound in my heart. I am thankful for the echo of you in my dreams. Sometimes I can feel you lingering when I wake, like that first day without you. I would give anything to go back to a morning with you before Ormaie, before that awful climb and awful jump that took you too far from me. You’re ten steps ahead of me, my love, and you will be for some time to come I think. 

Rose looks at me, concerned, when I return to where I am supposed to be. You would like her I think. She is young, but sharp and clever, a pilot from America. She’s my closest friend now that you are gone. I am glad she is with me here today. I am glad you were with me here today, even if I only saw you for the briefest moment. 

The wedding was simple. I laughed more that day than I had in a year. Being a part of your family is a strange feeling, like shoes that are too tight the first time you wear them. My chest is tight as I think of you, surrounded by your brothers, and the boys your mother has taken in, and your parents who keep looking at me like I’ve been one of their own my whole life. 

Jamie and I fall asleep almost instantly, still in our uniforms after the day. We’ve been exhausted. The war has drained us both, made us both hollow and fulfilled at the same time. I don’t know what we would be doing without it, if the old normal before the war would feel right. I wonder how we’ll find a new normal after.

I can feel your presence as I fall asleep, I can almost smell your perfume. You’re an echo out of time, the true ghost of Castle Craig.

If I am to be haunted, I am glad it is you. 

_ Wait for me, I’m coming with - _

  
  


_ Wait for me, I’m coming. _

It is not me who sees you the fourth time, nor the fifth, or sixth, or seventh, or many times after that. It is your niece who peers over my shoulder with wide blue eyes and stretches her hands out for someone who isn’t there. She is not my daughter, but the seventh of my nieces and nephews. Everyone says I got her first smile, but she was looking over my shoulder, a toothless grin directed at the empty space next to me. She babbled at nothing all through toddlerhood, and showed toys off to empty space in front of her even if other children were in the room. She found a photo of you once and waved at it.

Mackenzie was born on the tenth anniversary of your death. She was frail, and she was blue, and she did not cry at first. But she rallied and wailed and truly has not stopped making noise since. Your mother said you were much the same when you were a baby. I was almost convinced Mac was you, reincarnated, back to give us all hell, but Mac doesn’t have your cunning or your wit. She is softer than you were, less of a fire and more like safely banked coals. She is like you but not. She is your mirror image though. I will get to watch her grow up, live the life we fought for. 

There are several nieces and nephews now. All of your brothers have settled down and married, had children. Jamie and I will never have children. I could not be a mother, not in this lifetime. I have seen too much of this world to, in good conscious, bring a child into it, not to mention the fact I simply don’t want children. I am more than happy being an aunt to a new generation of Beaufort-Stuarts. 

Mackenzie is ten now, and it has been twenty years since your death. She has broken her habit of staring over my shoulder, saying hello to empty space behind me. She begs for stories about Aunt Julie from all of us. Your mother and father tell the kindest stories about you. Jamie tells by far the worst stories, and I try to simply tell the truth about Julie and Queenie and Eva and who you were in the moments you weren’t trying to be anyone at all. Mac says she wants to be a spy like you, that she can be brave and strong like her Aunt Julie. I tell her that Aunt Julie would want her to be brave and strong in her own way. 

Jamie has begun to go grey, says it’s the years of dealing with you and the war finally catching up to him. His limp is more pronounced now, but he insists it is only the rainy weather we’ve had recently. He ignores that he is nearing forty, that he is not a boy of twenty-five anymore. He started a business with Sandy, a small publishing company that supports the veterans of the war. 

Julie, love, you would laugh to see me now. I’m a teacher at an all girl’s school. I teach science: engineering when I can sneak it in, biology when I have to. I went to university after the war, passed with flying colors. I tried to take classes on literature, like you would have, but I only fell asleep during the lectures. I will happily leave the prose to you and Jamie, and keep the machines for myself. 

I wish you could have seen what came after the war. I wish you were here with us, telling Mac your own stories. But you are not here. I am, and I will keep telling your story. 

  
  


_ Wait for me, I’m coming with - _

  
  


_ Wait for me, I’m coming. _

It is 1993 when I lose another Beaufort-Stuart, and Julie, I see you the day Jamie dies. He was an old man by the time his luck ran out and a drunk driver jumped the curb. We had been happy, he and I, these fifty years. It hadn’t been perfect, but it had worked. We’d retired to a little cottage not far from Mac and her partner Isadora. 

Well. Jamie had retired, I am determined to teach for a few more years. 

He was on his way to their house, wanting to ask Isadora a question about his garden, when a drunk twenty-something drove up onto the sidewalk. The driver called paramedics to the scene, but it was too late for Jamie. Mac had been expecting her uncle, went looking for him when he didn’t arrive on time. She found the scene just as the paramedics were covering the body.

I do not need her frantic phone call to tell me that he was dead, because I see you first. I had just gone out to check the mail when I saw you across the street from me. You had tears on your face. You let out a single sob, just one little noise, and shook your head. I blinked and you were gone. A neighbor asked if I was alright, said I looked like I’d seen a ghost. How to tell him I had? How to tell him, tell anyone, about you all these years later? Fifty years have passed, Julie. I waved off the neighbor, went inside, and waited for the phone call. 

Jamie got the military funeral you both deserved. They drape the flag over his coffin, they shoot the volley, and they play the song. Some of our old friends from the war show up. Rose flies in from America and brings her son with her. We are a sad little group at this point, no longer the twenty-somethings we were and with all the achy bones to prove it. I am old now, Julie, and I can remember you saying you were afraid to grow old. I wanted to grow old with you, and grew old with Jamie instead. I think of him, newly buried on the chapel grounds where we got married.Your parents are buried there too, and your eldest brother’s wife. I think of you, somewhere outside of Ormaie, hopefully buried by someone who cared a little bit. 

Your last words to me were “Kiss me, Hardy. Kiss me, quick!”

Jamie’s last words to me were “I’ll be back soon, Maddie dear.”

I cannot tell you which hurts more.

I tell Mac the night after the funeral that I want to go to France, where I haven’t been since the war. Jamie and I had almost gone on the fiftieth anniversary of your death, but had never actually made the plans. I am the last one left of our little trio. I will remember both of you in France. Mac only nods. I think she suspects there was more between you and I than what the official record states, but she doesn’t ever ask her questions. 

I hope Jamie is with you, telling you about our lives. I hope you are with him, helping him learn to be dead. I can really only handle one Beaufort-Stuart haunting me, and I’d prefer it to be you. 

  
  


_ Wait for me, I’m coming with - _

  
  


_ Wait for me, I’m coming. _

I do not see you as I am dying, and it’s not fair. If I thought I was an old woman twenty-five years ago, I am ancient now. Maybe this is the part of old age you were afraid of all those years ago. Arthritis took my ability to fly and drive and fix things. My hands are bent and twisted now, but they are still the same hands that flew planes during the war, that helped children hold a pencil correctly, that held our niece when she came into the world, and held her hand at her wedding. 

They are still the same hands that held you. 

Cancer took my ability to do most other things. My doctors think it’s from all the fumes I inhaled flying broken planes during the war, the second hand smoke from being around all those pilots and soldiers all the time. I tell them I have been alive for ninety-seven years, and nothing should be expected to function perfectly after that long. 

It’s been seventy-five years since you died and I lost a part of myself forever. It’s been twenty-five years since Jamie died and another piece of me broke off. I remain broken into thirds. 

I’m still stuck in the climb, foolishly believing you have been stuck in the fall all this time. The world has evolved since then, and has become this twisted kaleidoscope of things I know, things I remember, and things I don’t understand. I still understand the climb though. Nothing sticks out with the same level of clarity as that time in suspended animation, stuck in the sky. 

I’m still on the edge of that miserable clearing watching you fall in slow motion. Julie, you would have hated dying like this. I have told my favorite nurse about you, about “Kiss me, Hardy”. I have told Mac about you, about us, finally. I wanted it all out in the open before my part of the story is gone. She has brought me all of your papers. They lay on my bedside. Your handwriting is a comfort as it always has been. Reading your words is like hearing your voice. Your voice always brings me back to that clearing, that final plea and command and damnation and salvation in one. 

“Kiss me, Hardy,” and I wished I could. 

“Kiss me, quick,” and I knew I must. 

I don’t regret it now. 

The part of me that has been living is failing. I am very old, very weak. I know I am dying and have made my peace with it. I will see Jamie again, and I’m sure he will laugh at how winkled I have become. 

I will see you again and maybe you will turn to me again and take my hand again and call me “Maddie, darling” again. 

I am too weak to talk now. Moving my hand is a struggle, but I grab the papers from my bedside table and begin to read again. Ours is an old tale from way back when girls could fly planes alone and tip bombs out of the sky and write truths in lies and love each other with a fire that burns through time. It was written long ago, and that is how it goes. 

And I read it anyway. I close my eyes and I can see our story against a sky that went blue, then green,

Then - 

_ Wait for me, I’m coming with -  _

“Julie!” I yell. And finally, finally,  _ finally _ you turn back to me. And you smile. Julie, you are beautiful and radiant and brilliant as ever. You hold out your hand to me.

“Wait for me, I’m coming with you.”


End file.
